English version

The Bribe and the Mockery raise their own failure to a form of art. In their opinion, they do nothing perfectly, everything a little bit and most times they do it wrong. With their black humor Lennart and Moritz create tragic-comic stories of losers on paper and accentuate those with guitar, keyboard and sample-machine tunes. While listening to these weird Folk songs, a warmth intimacy is unfolded. An invisible hand of comfort rests on your shoulder and says, that everything is not as bad as it looks. We are all in the same boat…

The duo met in 2010 in Marburg in university. Nowadays both are living in Berlin. If they are not voicing their distress to each other, they are on tour, record songs on tapes during nighttime in Moritz’s room or release an EP, like “Reason Will Prevail”, that was mixed in Frankfurt and released on the Slovakian indie label “Resonating Wood Recordings”. Their hope: Maybe somebody will buy their music. We respond: No doubt!

3 questions to The Bribe and the Mockery

Your music is composed of different sounds: guitar, vocals, keyboard and sound samples from tv series. How do you merge the different parts?

Most of the time, the guitar and the vocals are the base. The other elements are just added naturally. And since we both consume many series and that, what we watch, certainly does influence us, we try to integrate that into our music. We use the samples in our songs when we have the feeling that they add something that only can be conveyed through another voice. We try to describe a world view that is pretty close to our real life. Media consumption as well as pop culture are an unavoidable part of it. Like Talib Kweli in a track of Danger Doom says: “It seem to me that cartoons be realer than Reality TV.”

You make failure an art form. From which failures did you learn personally the most?

That is the question. Do we really learn something or is our perception of failure so irrevocable, that only that can determine our actions? First of all, its all about accepting our failures. Those are always a part of every artistic process. For us it is also a part of the result. With that, our music is human, intimate and tangible. But what failure exactly means, everyone has to decide for themselves. To put it positively: We hope that our music gains with that a certain level of honesty. We see ourselves in the tradition of Anti-Folk.

This year, The Fever Creek Festivals celebrates its 5th birthday. We are looking forward to making nice moments and to see you as on of our first acts ever play again at the festival. But we want to know: What is your best birthday memory?

Well, since we are celebrating the birthday of the Fever Creek Festival, this shouldn’t be about us. The actual date of birth of the Fever Creek Festival is for our band one of the loveliest memories we have, because it was the first time that we felt, that we can spread our message in the world and will get back something from it. (At the time of the interview, Moritz was about to turn 30. So birthdays are not an easy topic right now. Lennart already got closer to this topic, takes it with resignation and practices himself in acceptance. Just the time will stay our mutual enemy.)